Hi everyone!
Well, the end of the (traditional) working week is here again and with Friday comes a sense of relief and happiness for most workers as they ‘cut loose’ for the weekend. This anticipation of the end of the working week, is so well captured in one of my most favourite songs of all time – the 1966 Easybeats’ hit, Friday On My Mind. What a great song – catchy tune and lyrics that still resonate like an anthem for workers everywhere.
Friday On My Mind became a worldwide hit soon after it was released, and in 2001 was voted “Best Australian Song” of all time by the Australasian Performing Right Association . The song in its simplicity captures the tedium and drudgery of the working week while at the same time is full of anticipation of better times.
The workforce of the sixties, when the song was released, was of course very different to today in lots of ways. Most women didn’t work and men were the sole breadwinners. And those women that did work, often had to resign once they were married! Office workers used typewriters instead of PCs and part-time and casual work was uncommon. In the 1960s, tea ladies still did the rounds, smoking in the workplace was the norm, and the standard working week was Monday to Friday – nine to five.
Fast forward to today, and the tea lady has been replaced by handwritten notes in the kitchen warning staff to clean up after themselves, and smoking is no longer permitted in, or outside, many workplaces. People are working an increasingly diverse range of hours and patterns, often related to their stage of life or family circumstances. Women’s participation in the labour force has almost doubled, they are starting a family much later in life, and having fewer children. So, with all that change why do the lyrics of Friday On My Mind still resonate?
Monday morning feels so bad,
Ev’rybody seems to nag me
Coming Tuesday I feel better,
Even my old man looks good,
Wednesday just don’t go,
Thursday goes too slow,
I’ve got Friday on my mind
I reckon it could be because no matter how much we like our jobs, time spent with family and friends doing the things we enjoy most on our own terms, trumps most jobs every time.
What do you think?
Have a great weekend.
Carole
Very topical question Carole… Aside from the obvious idea that if our jobs reflected our true calling in life, and were therefore more than just ‘jobs’, we would be excited and challenged in our working lives and not ‘live for the weekend’ and ‘dread the weekdays’, perhaps there is this: a friend of mine (and old colleague) made a comment over 10 years ago I never forgot, oddly enough at a work function. In response to a query ‘why kids appear to be more spoilt and unappreciative in these times’ versus less prosperous times decades ago, she offered the following suggestion, “I think it is because kids nowadays don’t have anything to fight for” – when applied to us adults, perhaps if our working lives reflected a cause or something we value so deeply that we would be willing to defend it, protect it, fight for it, and maybe even die for it, as indeed most of us would for our families and our dearest of friends, ‘work’ in the sense we have come to define it would cease to apply. Boredom and lack of personal challenge is today’s silent killer.